Oil firms went to court seeking to lift a six-month freeze on deepwater drilling as the US government slapped BP with another major bill for the Gulf of Mexico disaster. The White House sent BP a bill for 51 million dollars, the third sent to the British energy giant and its partners for government expenses incurred in efforts to halt the oil spill under a US law requiring oil firms to pay for cleanups. Two earlier bills to BP and other responsible parties this month amounting to 70.89 million dollars have been paid in full. BP also said it has spent two billion dollars so far on cleaning up the spill and compensating residents and businesses facing ruin nine weeks into the nation's worst ever environmental disaster. Some 32 US firms, whose crews and equipment have been left idle since US President Barack Obama imposed a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf, were urging federal judge Martin Feldman to ease the restrictions.
"There's an ecosystem of businesses that are being harmed every day by this moratorium," Carl Rosenblum, an attorney for the oil companies, insisted in a reference to the environmental damage being inflicted on southern US shores. But government lawyer Guillermo Montero replied that deepwater drilling was more complicated than many other industries and the government had to review and, if necessary, update its safety protocols. "The Deepwater Horizon incident was a game-changer. It really showed the risks inherent in deepwater drilling," he told the New Orleans court hearing. Feldman said he could rule on the case as early as Tuesday, but certainly no later than noon (1700 GMT) Wednesday. In a deal hammered out with the White House last week, BP agreed to set up a 20-billion-dollar compensation fund over the next four years to pay for the costs stemming from the spill. It also set aside 100 million dollars to compensate oil workers laid off by the moratorium imposed after a deadly April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, the BP-leased rig off the Louisiana coast.
Kenneth Feinberg, who has been named to run the fund, said Obama told him: "Get these claims paid. Get them paid quickly." But the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that BP's additional sum for unemployed workers was a goodwill drop in the ocean compared with the estimated 300 million dollars being lost every month as rigs are mothballed. BP had successfully argued in the negotiations that the moratorium was a US administration policy decision, for which they were not responsible. "You won't find many lawyers who will say when the government imposes a moratorium it's the company's obligation to help the workers impacted," a BP negotiator told the business daily. BP had also managed to fend off White House demands to pay to restore Gulf marshes and waterways -- already blighted since the 2005 Hurricane Katrina -- to a better condition than before the spill.
Meanwhile, BP boss Tony Hayward was openly mocked by the White House after he took part in a yacht race at the weekend, in another public relations blunder by the gaffe-prone chief executive. "If Tony Hayward wants to put a skimmer on that yacht and bring it down to the Gulf, we'd be happy to have his help," spokesman Bill Burton said to laughter in the White House briefing room. And in more bad news for BP, a worker who had been on the Deepwater Horizon revealed he had alerted both the British company and Transocean, the rig's owners, to a leak found in the control pod of the blowout preventer -- a system of valves which failed to shut off the oil flow when the explosion happened. "We saw a leak on the pod, so by seeing the leak we informed the company men," Tyrone Benton told the BBC.
"They have a control room where they could turn off that pod and turn on the other one, so that they don't have to stop production... they just shut it down and worked off another pod." The news came as internal BP documents suggested that in the worst case scenario some 100,000 barrels of oil per day could be spilling into the Gulf -- far higher than US official estimates of 35,000 to 60,000 barrels per day. BP says it is containing around 25,000 barrels per day, and has called in more ships and equipment to boost the effort. But it has admitted the spill will not be permanently capped until it has completed two relief wells, with the first set to be finished in August.
